Yeah, I ended up dropping 4Gb in that one. For some reason it could only see 3Gb, but it made it immensely more useful. It got me through a radio production degree and only got replaced because I happened to find myself in a position to be able to afford a 13" Pro a few years later. In fact, it’s still in a box somewhere.
I’ll never forget buying my first MacBook in '07 and asking the guy how much it would cost to bump the RAM from 1Gb to 2Gb. He told me in no uncertain terms that I’d be better off looking online for a cheaper price.
Well, in the intervening years they certainly have closed that loophole.
You can already run Graphene entirely without Play Services. You have to install them yourself after you set up. It’s just that if you do install them, they’re sandboxed.
I’m not an expert by any means, I moved directly to Graphene after 15 years of iPhones without really touching Android in between, so I mostly scrabboed about, found a path that worked and stuck to it.
But the way I use it is with Aurora to install apps from the Play Store. You can use it anonymously, or you can log in to your own Google account.
In terms of other Google services, you can install then, whereby Graphene will run them in a sandbox. You have control over how much data they can have. For me it strikes a happy balance between knowing that I have some semblance of control, but also having the convenience of things like Maps. And Google’s camera app is much much better than any of the others I’ve tried. Which is annoying.
Ah, that’ll be why it feels rock solid then…
To be honest, they offer different use cases, so no, probably not.
Syncthing can be used collaboratively, inasmuch as I could share a folder with my wife, for example, but I think the primary use of it is to enable syncronisation of a folder between several personally accessed computers. If you do share with others, you’ll have to share a separate folder, so will end up with a bunch of different folders all being shared with different computers.
Not to mention that Nextcloud offers other functionality that isn’t necessarily possible with Syncthing. That said, I guess you could save your calendar to a folder in Syncthing and have it sync between devices. So I suppose it could replicate some of the functions.
I think I use Syncthing more than any other tool. I have a bunch of different computers, and all of them are running a Syncthing server, all hooked in to the same folders, all sharing the same documents. I have it running on my GrapheneOS phone too, so my photos folder gets shared as well.
It can be kinda fiddly to set up the sharing, making sure that you point the shared folders at the right place on your system, but once you’ve got it dialed in it’s invaluable.
For example; it’s where I keep my Calibre library, so no matter which of my computers I’m on, I can open Calibre, drop a book in, and know that it’ll be ready to load onto my Kobo. I do a weekly radio show, so I keep all of the documentation around that in a folder that I work from locally, whether I’m on my MacBook or Linux desktop.
The only downside to it is that (as far as I can tell) you can’t store everything on one device to download to others as you need (like iCloud Drive or Dropbox), so if your Syncthing folder takes up 30Gb on your 2Tb server, it’ll also take up 30Gb on your 128Gb phone. So it does mean having to be a little judicious with what you drop in there.
Basically, I love Syncthing. It means that I have access to everything I need access to, without having to shell out money each month to rent space from a cloud provider. And because I have all of my devices sharing all the folders with all the others, even if one drops offline, the others still get updated damn near immediately.
I used to be all-in on Input Leap, despite some weird, buggy behaviour I kept experiencing. Someone mentioned DeskFlow to me, which is another fork of Synergy, and which has been far more solid for me.
🎶 If it’s going up your arsehole flare the base If it’s going up your arsehole flare the base If it’s going up your arse, there’s a point it mustn’t pass If it’s going up your arsehole flare the base 🎶
You don’t have to run any Google stuff at all, if you don’t want to.
I bought a Pixel 9 with the sole intention of putting Graphene on it. I wasn’t massively down with giving Google money, but my provider offered it to me for £30, then £30 a month on contract. Can’t argue with that.
If you have a Pixel, then GrapheneOS is the sensible choice. Not least because it currently only works with Pixels anyway.
Nerds were no longer beaten for knowing how tech works.
Looking at the nerds fucking things up right now, I’d say they could stand a few extra beatings.
Auto-hiding on the seam between my two monitors for me.
I was merrily listening to Apple Music via WinApps the other day, when the Windows guest threw up a notification that it hadn’t found any malware. Literally no way to dismiss it without quitting out of any WinApps I had open.
Good old Windows.
I have WinApps running on the little Dell PC I have at work. It’s only an i3 with 8Gb RAM, but it’s ok with Apple Music and MS Office apps. I wouldn’t want to seriously run any games through it, mind.
Get a Kobo. Read the book, click the buttons that take you to another book.
Dankpods has gone in on Linux too. He did a video about building a Bazzite PC a couple of weeks back.
Horrifying.
If you tried that in the part of England I’m from you’ll end up getting sectioned for your own good.